Born on March 12, 1928, in Washington, D.C., Edward Albee
was adopted as an infant by Reed Albee, the son of Edward Franklin
Albee, a powerful American Vaudeville producer. Brought up in
an atmosphere of great affluence, he clashed early with the strong-minded
Mrs. Albee who attempted to mold him into a respectable member
of the Larchmont, New York social scene. But the young Albee
refused to be bent to his mother's will, choosing instead to
associate with artists and intellectuals whom she found, at the
very least, objectionable.

At the age of twenty, Albee moved to New York's Greenwich
Village where he held a variety of odd jobs including office
boy, record salesman, and messenger for Western Union before
finally hitting it big with his 1959 play, The Zoo Story.
Originally produced in Berlin where it shared the bill with Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape,
The Zoo Story told the story of a drifter who acts out
his own murder with the unwitting aid of an upper-middle-class
editor. Along with other early works such as The Sandbox
(1959) and The American Dream (1960), The Zoo Story
effectively gave birth to American absurdist drama. Albee was
hailed as the leader of a new theatrical movement and labeled
as the successor to Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene
O'Neill. He is, however, probably more closely related to
the likes of such European playwrights as Beckett and Harold
Pinter. Although they may seem at first glance to be realistic,
the surreal nature of Albee's plays is never far from the surface.
In A Delicate Balance (1966), for example, Harry and Edna
carry a mysterious psychic plague into their best friends' living
room, and George and Martha's child in Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? (1962) turns out to be nothing more than a figment
of their combined imagination, a pawn invented for use in their
twisted, psychological games. In Three Tall Women (1994),
separate characters on stage in the first act turn out to be,
in the second act, the same character at different stages of
her life.

Albee describes his work as "an examination of the American
Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values
in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation
and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this
slipping land of ours is peachy-keen."

Although he suffered through a decade of plays that refused
to yield a commercial hit in the 1980's, Albee experienced a
stunning success with Three Tall Women (1994) which won
him his third Pulitzer Prize as well as Best Play awards from
the New York Drama Critics Circle and Outer Critics Circle. He
had previously won Pulitzers for A Delicate Balance (1966)
and Seascape (1975). Other awards include an Obie Award
(1960) and a Tony Award (1964).